Most workers (84%) estimate they’re able to refocus completely within around half an hour after they were initially distracted.

The impact of workplace distractions according to Udemy are:

54% aren’t performing as well as they should.

50% say they’re significantly less productive.

20% not able to reach full potential, advance in career.

Those statistics look pretty bad for performance, there is little surprise as with access to the internet and notifications coming through to our phones from friends and family around the clock, it is easy to get distracted and temporarily postpone work.

While that isn’t an issue, it may become the reason for a lowered performance rate if it happens too often due to additional stress.

And so, in order to achieve great work-related results and keep yourself focused throughout the working hours, you need to understand where lucrative distractions come from and limit your exposure to them.

Actionable tips:

Turn off your smartphone or set it to not disturb mode. If you find it difficult for you to totally disable your phone, you should set up work and rest intervals. For example, for every one hour of work, you get a 10-minute break on your phone. Eventually, over a couple of weeks, you can try to increase the work time while minimizing the time you spent on your phone.

Work in a quiet place or use headphones to minimize distractions from around the office.

Give yourself random rewards. This way, you will want to get work completed which will put your mind further away from wanting to distract yourself from work.

If you are working from home due to Covid-19, you should dedicate space within your home (preferably a spare room) and turn it into your office. This way, you will keep distractions from children or pets to a minimum so that you can focus more on your work.

2. Split your tasks into milestones

When working on a big project, the single best thing you can do in order to ensure that you aren’t falling behind schedule and are performing at a high level is to break down your tasks into small and easily achievable milestones with appropriate time frames.

This way, you will know exactly what needs to be done and the date that it needs to be completed by so the overall project is put together by the set deadline.

Actionable tips:

Segment your workload into easily manageable milestones.

Allocate sufficient amounts of time per milestone in order to achieve a great overall outcome.

3. Stop multitasking, prioritize your work

Multitasking at work is not uncommon. If you work in a busy agency, for example, it is not rare for you to handle communications with potential clients, talk with different contractors, handle and check work from freelancers while doing your actual job on top of that.

While you may be thinking that this way you actually get more work done, what you are doing is really impacting not only your level of output for your actual job but also the quality.

According to the article “Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching”, multitasking can lead to a 40% reduction in productivity.

Actionable tips:

Rather than multitasking 3 different projects at a time, prioritize them and work on each one individually. This way, you will not only provide better quality work as your focus remains on a single topic but will also be able to do your work much quicker and more effectively

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